A Wet Year it Was…or Was it?

Rain will return to Alabama overnight as another upper level disturbance zips by us in the northwesterly flow aloft.

72 hour QPF

RAINFALL TOTALS: By the time the rainfall ends later today, there should be a sharp gradient in rainfall amounts across Central Alabama, from 0.10” around Jasper to 0.25” around Birmingham to a little more than one inch at Montgomery to five inches at Mobile! This should put Birmingham at nearly 61.25 inches of rain for the year. If we could make It to 62 inches, it would put us in the top 25 years for rainfall since 1895. Our normal annual rainfall is 53.72 inches.

This will mostly put a bow on our rainfall for the year.

AND A WET YEAR IT WAS: Or was it? When you look at the year to date rainfall across Central Alabama as compare to normal on a percentage basis, we see quite a range of values. In fact, about as much of Central Alabama is near or below normal as has been wetter than normal.

YTD Precipitation – % of Normal

It seems like the year has been wetter because the past 180 days have been generally wetter than normal across Central Alabama.

If you look at a time series graph of accumulated precipitation for Birmingham for the year, you see that we didn’t go above normal for the year consistently until July.

DROUGHT BE GONE: One year ago 35 percent of Alabama was in full blown drought conditions and nearly 72 percent of the state was at least abnormally dry.

Today, zero percent of the state is even abnormally dry. But I am not telling you anything you don’t know already.

Category: Alabama's Weather